How Champlin’s Sugar Creek Farm Tripled Sales with Smart Marketing

Jan 8

“We're investing less time on marketing and more time on the farm, which is great.”

Case Study: Web Design — Email Automations — Social Media Marketing

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

We recently spoke to Ryan Champlin of Champlin’s Sugar Creek Farm to learn about the history of his family’s grass-fed and finished cattle operation and how working with Grapevine to develop the ranch’s website and improve its email and social media outreach resulted in:

Nearly tripled sales

Sold out inventory

earlier each year

Ranked #1 on Google

for 40 new keywords

275 new visitors

per month on the website

Preserving a Legacy of Regenerative Farming through Online Sales

About 10 years ago, Ryan started taking a more active role in managing the ranch that his parents purchased in 1971, and began to focus on raising pastured beef cattle for direct-to-consumer sales. At first, Champlin’s sold to a loyal base of friends and family, but as word got out, demand grew rapidly and the ranch experienced a significant jump in demand. The family realized they had an opportunity on their hands, but needed some support to scale and make business operations smoother.

Adapting to Meet the Demand for Grass-Fed Beef

The farm needed a way to take advantage of this new momentum by:

Reaching new customers,
Making purchasing easier and more accessible, and
Communicating with a larger customer base more efficiently.

Ryan was spending a significant amount of his time taking orders via phone and email using a PDF form he created to guide inexperienced customers through the process of buying farm-direct bulk beef for the first time. Much of the process was manual and time-consuming. As the business (and Ryan’s family) grew, this became less sustainable, and Champlin’s started looking for a new approach.

Increasing Farm Efficiency Through Digital Marketing

Ryan’s goal was to simplify the farm’s entire engagement model. He wanted to make it easy for inexperienced customers to choose bulk beef shares, find information they were looking for, and use their preferred form of payment. This meant he needed more than just an online farm store; he needed a comprehensive digital marketing strategy and a technical infrastructure that could scale with his business growth without taking up all of his time. Plus, Champlin’s is a family farm, so he needed a branding package that kept the family at the forefront of the business.

Choosing GrazeCart as an ecommerce platform was the first step; the second was to find a marketing agency with the expertise to build out the farm’s web presence through a cohesive strategy and the experience to understand the particular needs of a small regenerative farm.

Sales Nearly Triple with Website Launch

As a GrazeCart Recommended Consultant, Grapevine was a clear choice for a partner. (Grapevine also works with farms on Barn2Door, Farmigo, Local Food Marketplace, Shopify, Square, Squarespace, and other platforms.)

Our team developed a strategy to help Ryan reach his goals of:

Streamlining communications,
Attracting new customers,
Increasing farm sales year over year,
Selling out bulk beef orders sooner in the year.

To achieve these goals, Grapevine implemented a farm marketing strategy that included:

A logo and branding package
Custom Grazecart website design
Drip email automations
SEO tactics, including an optimized Google Business Profile
Targeted local social media advertising

The short- and long-term results that Champlin’s Farm experienced clearly demonstrate the power of Grapevine’s proven marketing framework:

The Foundation: Branding, Website, and Email Marketing

“Over the last couple of years since we launched the website we've had significant growth in net new customers on top of regular customers that keep coming back year after year.”

Grapevine designed a logo that captured the unique characteristics of Champlin’s history, location, and product, and then carried those design elements throughout an SEO-ready, sales-driving website that included easy-to-find information about purchasing farm-direct meat. We also implemented an email marketing strategy that made customer communications significantly easier and less time-consuming.

Results: Nearly tripled sales within 2 years of website launch, significantly decreased time spent on customer communications, and a website that ranks #1 for 40 keywords and has an average of 275 new website visitors per month.

Reaching New Customers: Offsite SEO and Meta Advertising

“Website traffic significantly increased after we added all of our products to our Google profile…and every time we have done [paid social media ads] we've seen a bump in new customers.”

Champlin’s had an existing Google Business Profile, but wasn’t using it to its full potential. Grapevine set to work implementing one of our highest ROI projects: optimizing the profile to drive website visits and increase sales by letting users shop directly from Google’s search results page. We further bolstered the farm’s off-site tactics by implementing paid social media advertising, including training sessions that enabled the farm to run ads themselves later on.

Results: Over 200% increase in web traffic within a week of launching an optimized Google Business Profile and an increase in orders and new customers with each instance of paid social advertising.

Fostering Repeat Customers with Ease: Building Relationships, Automated Communications, and a Convenient Shopping Experience

“Time that I used to spend on marketing [is spent] on the farm, working with animals, [and] focusing on some of the improvements so we can continue to grow our business.”

Grapevine worked with Ryan to streamline farm customer communications by setting up email automations that automatically re-engage new and potential customers without extra work on Ryan’s part. We set up automated emails and SMS text messages that:

Educate customers on pickup/delivery processes,
Alert them of order deadlines and low inventory,
Remind them to complete orders, and
Update them on where their bulk beef orders are in the process of butchering and delivery.

We also implemented other relationship-building communications, like a welcome series that engages potential farm customers as soon as they sign up to receive emails. Along with a streamlined ordering process thanks to an optimized ecommerce website, this significantly reduced the time Ryan was spending processing orders and communicating with customers, which has allowed him to focus on other growth opportunities so he can continue to scale his farm business as demand grows.

Results: Selling out earlier and earlier each year with less time spent on marketing, allowing the family to increase inventory while spending more time doing what they love.

Shout-out to the Champlin’s Sugar Creek Farm family!

We were so inspired to hear about the ways Ryan is adapting his business model and operating methods to ensure his family’s farm remains a solid, dependable business that can be passed down to his children if they choose that path. It’s clear the family is not only meeting the challenges of modern farming, but truly making the most of what modern farm marketing methods have to offer in a way that will make farming a viable career option for the next generation to consider.

We see this as a great service not only to the Champlin family, but to the farming industry and our society’s food security as a whole, which is threatened by a decline in small, family-run farms that have been feeding their communities for generations. We’re so appreciative of the intentionality with which this family approaches their business and grateful to be involved in this noble work!

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